Tom Brokaw on new media

From this New Yorker profile of Keith Olbermann.

Brokaw calls this moment in the news media “the second big bang.” “We are creating a new universe, and it has all kinds of new laws and science and physics coming into play as well, in this information world,” he told me. “And you’ve got planets out there colliding with each other, new life forms taking shape; others have drifted too close to the sun, and they’ve burned up. And we don’t know how it’s all going to settle down. And it has, now and forevermore, a radiant effect.”

A perfectly ludicrous response to ludicrousity

In response to the Associated Press’s ridiculous claim that anyone who quotes more than 5 words of one of their articles should pay for the privilege, Michael Arrington has sent them a DMCA notice for quoting more than 5 words from one of his blog posts.

While on the one hand I think this is a perfectly appropriate move, illustrating the absurdity of the AP policy, I wonder if somehow it will provide encouragement to the wire service, you know, of the “if Arrington is doing it, then we made the right move” variety. I guess we’ll have to see how the situation develops.

Link: The A.P. Has Violated My Copyright, And I Demand Justice

Newspaper economics and the internet

Jack Shafer of Slate explains how newspapers hit hard times before the popularity of the internet, despite the general impression that it was the internet that began the decline of print news.

The newspaper industry began worrying about losing its hold on readers as early as the 1960s, assigning task force after task force to the problem. So acute was the perceived crisis that in 1976, Los Angeles Times media reporter David Shaw asked in his multipart series, “Are you now holding an endangered species in your hands?”

The bad news began to mount in the pre-pre-Internet days of the 1980s, when the number of dailies published in the United States began a slide that continues. By 1990, total newspaper circulation began to dip, and most ominously, the percentage of adults who read newspapers commenced cratering in 1970. About 78 percent partook of dailies then, and by 2003, only about 54 percent did.